


the slowest runner in all the world

by silkspectred



Series: the slowest runner [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aging, Alpha Steve Rogers, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Break Up, Depression, Empathic Bond, Hopeful Ending, Kidfic, M/M, Mating Bond, Medical Inaccuracies, Mpreg, Omega Tony Stark, Post-Break Up, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pregnancy, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Relationships, warning for vomiting but not graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 14:26:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14286891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkspectred/pseuds/silkspectred
Summary: Tony was pregnant in Siberia. Steve didn't know.[This is the main story that frames all the others.]





	the slowest runner in all the world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [krusca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/krusca/gifts).



> This is all [krusca](http://krusca.tumblr.com)'s fault. (No, okay, it's also my fault, because I love this trope).
> 
> Thanks to [gem](https://twitter.com/infinityygem) and [tones](https://twitter.com/ironmantrilogy) for beta.
> 
> Important visuals [here](https://twitter.com/starkspectre/status/896112131661119488) and [here](https://twitter.com/tonythicc/status/983811984276664321).

Tony exhales one more time, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling. His hot breath is visible in the cold air.

He strains to reach the emergency release button, hidden between two plates of the armor in his thigh. The suit hisses, and he’s immediately free of it.

He sits up and shivers. He doesn’t look at Steve’s shield on the floor.

He taps at his watch. Forty-five seconds, and a new armor will be here for him. It’s too long, but it’s in a damn satellite, and there’s nothing he can do about that. It’s as good as it gets for having the suit at his beck and call no matter where he is. But what if someone took him prisoner and locked him somewhere the suit can’t reach? What if…?

The suit is there. He waits for the pieces to assemble and open to welcome him inside.

He shivers again. He’s cold, and he’s bleeding. It’s bad. It’s so bad.

How did Steve do this to him?

He feels like vomiting, and he _really_ doesn’t want to vomit in the armor, so he waits a minute outside, in the cold, until the nausea goes away or just makes him sick.

It makes him sick.

He enters the suit, in the end. The HUD comes online and he doesn’t even need to ask the question.

“Two heartbeats detected, boss.”

Thank god. He doesn’t believe in any god, even though he has met some, but thank god.

He has no time to think that the little human growing inside him is Steve’s too. For a bit, Tony only thinks about them as _his._

“The closest hospital—”

“I want to go home, FRIDAY.”

“Boss—”

“Okay, hospital. But in New York. I don’t speak Russian. You think I can make it to New York?”

FRIDAY injects him with something. He tries to pinpoint what, but he can’t right now.

“Now you can,” she says.

***

The bruise on his chest is massive. It takes up half his body for weeks. It aches, but it’s nothing compared to what Steve’s absence does to him.

His scent has started to fade away from his pillow, and sometimes Tony sits inside Steve’s closet and closes his eyes, and he can pretend he never left.

 _For another Omega_ , an ugly part of his mind supplies, the opposite of helpful.

“No, it wasn’t like that,” he says out loud, in the darkness. Barnes isn’t even an Omega, for fuck’s sake.

***

The truth is, he misses Steve. He’s angry, so angry he can’t even see straight, but he misses Steve.

The bond is still there, still whole, but Tony never reaches for it with his mind, and he never feels Steve do it either. He wonders why Steve doesn’t ask some Wakandan doctor to break it.

Tony abandons it, and it wilts at the extremities, but nothing more.

***

He starts losing weight, which is the worst thing that could happen to someone in his situation. He has to be fed through an IV for about a month.

He strokes his abdomen and whispers, “I’m sorry, kid. It’s not your fault.”

Some of his heartbreak must slip away from his control and pass through the neglected bond, because the next thing he feels is a rush of love coming from the other end. It’s weak and muted, but it’s there.

He doesn’t send anything back, but that’s what makes him decide that he has to keep it together, no matter how he feels about Steve, no matter the state of their bond.

There’s a baby inside him and he can’t let them down.

His Omega instinct kicks in, stronger than any sense of betrayal. And the bite on his shoulder never fades.

***

His belly grows, and he can’t mask it anymore. He avoids being seen in public, only releases a couple of carefully filmed statements from behind his desk, and no one suspects a thing. No one is surprised if he looks tired.

The scan says it’s a girl.

***

Giving birth is relatively easy. It doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would, or maybe there are things that hurt more in Tony’s life at the moment.

Rhodey and Pepper are with him. Even Peter comes to visit him after he’s back at the compound.

And now he’s here, alone, with a baby girl that smells like him and Steve, and he doesn’t know what to do.

He looks at the flip phone on his dresser. He can’t call. To say what? _Oh, by the way, forgot to tell you…_

For something like that maybe Steve would really kill him.

***

A week later, news breaks out that the fugitive Avengers have signed the amended Accords, and are allowed back on US soil.

Tony just waits by the window, kissing the head of his daughter and not thinking about how much she looks like her father.

***

Two days later, Steve is there.

Tony leaves his baby asleep in his room, and goes downstairs to meet him.

Steve has a beard now, Tony notices as soon as he steps into the room. He looks older and beautiful. Somehow even more Alpha than before.

They are alone in the living room; everyone else knows better than being found here at a moment like this.

And it’s a good thing. Because Tony doesn’t think he could bear to know that someone else has seen Steve look at him like that.

It’s like he has it written on his forehead.

Tony’s smell has changed. It’s only normal. Maybe he smells like the widows, like a nest that’s half-full and half-empty at the same time, and the tang of sadness never quite leaves him.

Steve straightens his shoulders. It’s some dumb Alpha posturing that never meant _threat_ for Tony, only for everyone else.

Now he’s not so sure.

This is serious. It’s a serious insult for an Alpha. It’s one of the most unforgivable betrayals; it keeps them from being what they should be, what they are at their core: protectors, caretakers. Fathers.

Tony denied Steve his own family.

He’s going to kill him. He didn’t do it in Siberia but he’s gonna kill him now.

It’s usually how it goes. It’s rare, this kind of betrayal, but when it happens… the pile of Omega bodies grows.

“When?” Steve asks instead, voice rough as though he hasn’t used it in a long time.

“Ten days ago.”

“Did…” he pauses. “And you knew? Before?”

He doesn’t ask if she’s his. He doesn’t insult Tony like that. And he knows she’s his; she can only be his. She smells like him from a whole floor away, and Tony still smells like him. The bite on his shoulder stings.

“Yes,” Tony says, and in his mind it overlaps with another _yes._

Steve closes his eyes.

Tony is still expecting a blow. Or at least screaming, anger, anything.

“She’s upstairs if you want to—”

“I have a daughter. And you didn’t tell me.”

There it is. The barely-contained Alpha rage. Tony’s already mourning the coffee table. He likes that coffee table. That coffee table is gonna be in pieces in a minute.

“I thought I’d lose it. I’m almost fifty, Steve. I didn’t want to give you false hope. I know how much you wished… well…”

He’s done some calculations. He remembers the night it happened. Tony thought he still had a couple of days before his heat, so they didn’t use protection. But they were never that careful, truth be told, and Tony’s heats had been irregular for a few months.

He remembers how wet he was, how swollen Steve’s knot felt inside him; he remembers how hard Steve bit on his shoulder, over the mark already there. The smell of _mate_ , of _bond_. Of _family._

“Gonna… breed you,” Steve murmured in his ear, out of breath, while a sense of belonging stronger than anything Tony had ever felt surged across the bond. “Make you… mine,” Steve finished.

“Already yours,” Tony had said, and he can’t think about this anymore. All of a sudden, it almost makes him sick.

“But even later, you didn’t tell me,” Steve says, and Tony is brought back to the present.

“Well, we weren’t exactly on speaking terms, were we?”

“How did I not smell it on you?”

“There are, you know. Pills… They didn’t hurt her,” he hurries to add after the face Steve makes. “They’re safe, I promise. She’s fine.”

“Why did you hide it like this?”

“It wasn’t just for you, okay? I have a company to run, I had to deal with… I didn’t want anyone to know as soon as…”

It’s true. He didn’t want to hide it specifically from Steve. He wanted to hide it from everyone.

“What—”

And Tony is ready. He’s ready for the _how could you_ ’s, the recriminations, the anger, the resentment. Even the physical violence.

But none of that comes.

“What did you name her?” Steve asks, without looking at Tony. His shoulders have sagged a bit, in something that Tony classifies as defeat. He looks heartbroken, and that’s when Tony notices it.

Steve smells wrong.

Not like someone else. (Thank god. Fuck, thank god).

Just wrong.

He smells like himself, but like a fruit gone bad smells like itself. The familiar scent is covered up by something painful, sickening, rotten.

“Sarah,” Tony replies.

Steve’s eyes widen, and he rests a hand over his heart. “Like, like my… like my mother?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d like that.”

Steve lowers his head and nods. “I love it. Thank you.”

“I didn’t tell you, but… I never wanted to keep her from you. She’s your kid, too.”

“But I—”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not angry with you. I am.”

“I’m sorry, Tony. For what happened, I—”

“I don’t really… I don’t care. You made your choices and here we are.”

He didn’t think he was this angry. But Steve is here now, and everything is coming back in waves—terrible waves of hate that feel like they almost don’t belong to him because Tony isn’t like this, Tony doesn’t hate, and sure as hell he doesn’t hate Steve, but—

He swallows.

“That day when you reached for the bond, I sent—”

“I didn’t mean to do it.”

“I sent all I could, but the bond didn’t respond like normal and—”

“I felt it.”

“Were you—either of you—were you... hurt?”

“We weren’t. We weren’t really fine, but I guess it helped, yeah.”

Relief distends Steve’s features, but it’s not enough against the strength of his guilt.

“If you want to open it—”

“No,” Tony says, and Steve shivers. Dammit.

“You want to… to break it?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“No. No, Tony.”

Tony’s watch beeps, and then it cries. Sarah’s awake.

The effect it has on Steve is unbearable.

His head snaps up, eyes trained on the ceiling—exactly where Sarah’s crib is placed upstairs. He twitches with an energy he’s trying very hard to contain, but it’s spilling out of him nonetheless. His hands are shaking with it, and he’s about to bolt out of the room and go look for what’s _his._

But _baby in distress_ affects Tony just as much. He has to go to her, he has to be with her right now.

“Wait here,” he says.

“Tony—”

“Wait. Here.” Tony shouldn’t raise his voice. “I’ll bring her down.”

He’s quick up the stairs, and once in his room, he gathers Sarah in his arms and realizes that she needs to be changed.

When he goes back downstairs, Steve is nowhere to be seen.

There’s a text on the flip phone. It says, _I’m sorry. I have no right. I wasn’t even there when she was born. I’m so sorry._

***

_You weren’t there that day. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be there all the other days._

And Steve comes back.

***

Tony knows it’s Steve by the way he knocks on his door. It’s fast, but very soft. Steve has always been kind with him; he’s never been threatening or violent. Never. Except in Leipzig and that day in the HYDRA base in Siberia.

Tony is feeding Sarah while he says, “Come in.”

The first thing Steve does after closing the door behind himself is take an impossibly long breath and keep it his in lungs for a while, eyes closed.

He doesn’t come any closer, even after he opens his eyes and lets all the air out. He doesn’t really do anything; he’s like a broken robot.

“You don’t nurse her?” he asks, pointing at the baby bottle, and he doesn’t sound accusatory, just curious.

Tony gestures for him to open the first drawer of the dresser. “There’s a file… Yeah, that one.”

He waits while Steve reads it. He observes him as rage surges into him and then ebbs away while he looks at the pictures.

The pictures Tony’s doctor took of him, naked, pregnant, and with bruised skin from his collarbone to his navel.

He hopes that’s enough to explain why he can’t breastfeed.

“I want to throw myself off a building every time I think about that day,” Steve says, quietly, and maybe he meant to say it but not necessarily to be heard. “But I’d probably survive.”

Tony places the bottle on the table.

“You want to hold her?” he asks, and Steve nods. The way he does it, though, is as if someone is pointing a gun to his head and telling him to nod. Like he knows he shouldn’t want this.

He takes her in his arms and Tony sees Steve smile for the first time in a very long while.

***

Steve smells better, after that. Not like he should, and Tony doesn’t either. But they’re better.

***

Almost two years pass without Tony realizing.

They’re a good family. Sarah is a happy kid. She doesn’t know that her dads aren’t like all the parents she sees at the nursery school, all her friends’ parents. It’s extremely rare for mates to break the bond after having a kid. And sure, Steve and Tony didn’t break it. They just…ignore it.

But they are a good family.

***

“How are your heats?” Steve asks one day, right after Sarah has fallen asleep.

“They’re gone. Too old.”

“Have you tried, you know. Dating—”

“I thought about it. Never could go through with it. We’re still bonded, even though—”

“I know, yeah.”

There’s a brief silence.

“How are your ruts?”

“Don’t have them anymore.”

“What?” That’s not exactly rare, but it only ever happens in one case: when the Omega is dead. “I’m not dead.”

“But you won’t have me, so…”

Maybe Tony has underestimated how much Steve is hurting. He seems fine, except for the way he smells. But he’s also not a normal Alpha.

“It’s better like this, anyway,” he continues. “The thought of doing it with anyone else… I don’t want anyone else.”

Neither does Tony.

***

Thanos comes to Earth on the day of Sarah’s fourth birthday.

Tony is incredibly pissed off about that.

Steve? Steve fights someone called _the Mad Titan_ with his bare hands because he ruined his baby girl’s party.

And wins.

***

When Sarah is six, Tony decides that it’s time for her to have her own room in the compound. Steve agrees.

The project is simple; they just use the empty room between Steve’s room and Tony’s room.

They fill it with all her things—her computers, her She-Hulk poster, her books and toys.

She’s happy, and when she’s happy Tony’s happy. He doesn’t want anything more.

But still, for the first couple of weeks he keeps thinking things like _I need to buy Sarah’s shampoo_ when he enters the shower at night. Then, he remembers they haven’t run out; it’s just in another bathroom.

***

Sarah comes by to the workshop one day after school. Tony isn’t really looking at her; he’s reading through Pepper’s notes on the contract for a merger.

“Hey, kid,” he says, “no homework?” Sarah usually goes straight to her room after school.

She doesn’t reply. She sits on the couch _angrily._ How can anyone sit angrily? Sarah can.

She sniffs, and as usual it’s like an alarm goes off in Tony’s head.

“Baby?” he says, walking to the couch. “FRIDAY, call Steve immediately.”

“Yes, boss.”

He sits next to her, and she hides her face in his chest and cries. Tony hugs her back and when Steve is there too she explains what happened.

She’s been bullied at school, of course. She doesn’t want to say why, not even Steve can make her say why, but Tony knows. He knows why.

She calms down after a while. Steve guides her face to his neck, and maybe he doesn’t smell like happy-mated-bonded-Alpha dad, but he still smells like _dad_ and like _family_ , and that’s enough.

She leaves, and something inside Tony gives up the fight.

He sits back at his desk and Steve follows him, leaning back against the table.

Tony reaches for the bond inside his mind for the first time in ten years, and Steve gasps.

He shifts, and Tony turns around on his chair, letting his cheek rest over Steve’s stomach. Steve cups the back of his head, trailing his long fingers into Tony’s hair.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he says.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please no Captain America: Civil War discourse in the comments. I'm old and tired and no one will care anymore in a couple of weeks <3
> 
> The title is the name of a band I really really love.
> 
> On [Tumblr](http://silkspectred.tumblr.com/post/172834185950/the-slowest-runner-in-all-the-world-silkspectred)
> 
> On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/starkspectre/status/984148253724815360)


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